Good news, but we've heard the Sunni-tribes-turn-on-foreign-fighters story nearly as often as we've learned of Noah's Ark being discovered again.
The NY Times article on this
Iraqi Tribes to Join Forces to Fight Insurgents
More than two-dozen tribes from Iraq’s volatile Sunni Arab-dominated province west of Baghdad have agreed to join forces and fight Al Qaeda insurgents and other foreign-backed “terrorists,” an influential tribal leader said today.
Twenty-five of about 31 tribes in Anbar Province, a vast, mostly desert region that stretches westward from Baghdad to the borders of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have agreed to fight together against insurgents and gangs that are “killing people for no reason,” said the tribal leader, Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh Al-Rishawi.
“We held a meeting earlier and agreed to fight those who call themselves mujahedeen,” Mr. Rishawi said in an interview today. “We believe that there is a conspiracy against our Iraqi people. Those terrorists claimed that they are fighters working on liberating Iraq, but they turned out to be killers. Now all the people are fed up and have turned against them.”
Mr. Rishawi said the 25 tribes counted 30,000 young men armed with assault rifles who were willing to confront and kill the insurgents and criminal gangs that have torn at the fabric of tribal life in Anbar, dividing members by religious sect and driving a wave of violent crime.
An American military official said tribes had fought Sunni Arab insurgents in Anbar in the past, but previously had not agreed to come together and fight them together. “Tribes just get fed up have fought them in the past,” an American military official said today. “This would be the first we’ve seen of tribes banding together.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/world/middleeast/17cnd-iraq.html?_r=1&ei=5094&en=55ed48eed408153d&hp=&ex=1158552000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin